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Friday, November 14, 2008

John Deeth Blog: Four Iowa counties flip to McCain

Four Iowa counties which went Democratic in one of the biggest Republican landslides ever voted for John McCain last week -- and one of these things is not like the others. Swing State Project took a long-range look at voting trends and found 97 counties nationwide that backed Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan in the 1984 landslide, yet supported John McCain while Barack Obama was scoring a -- what should we call it? Let's say "comfortable victory." Those counter-trend counties are concentrated in Appalachia, but four spots appear in Iowa. Three of these double-maverick anti-bellwethers are small rural counties: Davis, Monroe, and Ringgold. But the fourth is high-growth, suburban Dallas County. Iowa was one of Mondale's stronger states at 46 percent, and the 1984 election was near the height of the farm crisis of the 1980s. That would help explain Davis, Monroe, and Ringgold.